I still subscribe to the idea that if you don’t have a passion for a subject you shouldn’t really be having anything to do with its shaping and direction.
So I know this has all been said before, but after Saturdays WHO episode, the hairs on the back of my neck started to bristle again. The 2 previous WHO’s were a master class in typically British sci-fi adventure. Lots of running around, shouting, malevolent aliens, understated class politics, abandoned chalk pits and the insides of HMS Belfast acting as a number of similar alien worlds, all unpinned and slightly undermined by sarcasm and irony, both forms of humour the British seemed to have been down to patent office with, years ago. All very BBC and all that.
Last week they even had Spitfires in space for fucks sake! It looked like it was about to “get very silly!”

Then all of a sudden, it went Stainless Steel Rat on us with Prof. Song dolled up in evening wear and killer heels breaking into a locked vault, cleverly leaving a note for the doctor and being recued from death by vacuum. Plots only hinted at over the 40 years started to raise their head, and finally the good doctor is seen as the ETERNAL CHAMPION.
Not just a quaint loner with a strange and unanswered affection for us, poor childlike humans, but a maverick hero with many pasts and even more futures. He can be seen now as another aspect to the equally British idea of anarchist heroes like Jerry Cornelius and Brian Talbot’s genius, Luther Arkwright, straddling time, space and alternate realities with confidence, arrogance and possibly a rather large cock. I really don’t know what’s happened at Who HQ? but since the head honcho left, it sounds as if Michael Moorcock had got the nod and in a narcotic haze got on the blower to Cardiff.

Ring... ring... ring... ring...click..
“hello?”
“Right! It’s yer man Moorcock here! This is how it’s gonna go down from now on, right?”
“er… right!”
“out goes all that badly thought out Nu London bollocks! You clearly haven’t been reading Robert Heinlein have you? Sack off all that the year is 1 million (yet we still look like chavs and shop at next?? WTF?) get in loads of SAS style priests, lets see more of what the doctor has got up to / will get up to when we weren’t / aren’t looking, give him a suitably hot wife/sister/mum that he occasionally has sex and/or a relationship with, bring in way more darkness and death and highlight the fact that he exists outside of time and space and has been championing us from the start.. ok? cracking!!..
right got it? Fuck this up and ill send Dave Brock round with a large baseball bat! Ta Ta!!”

Sunday, 4 April 2010

I picked this up a few years ago at a distributor i used to work for. It had been sitting on the shelf for ages and there was no info for it. Obviously it had to go home with me.
At first I thought it had something to do with the Brazilian funk scene, as the bearded man logo had been used by the legendary Brazilian DJ Ademir Lemos, partner to the even more legendary Big Boy. I had read a mighty article in this issue of WAX POETICS about these guys and the sound of Black Rio along with Tim Maia etc.. here is a great overview of all this lark on Go Go Gringo's blog. later on I found a 2 part doc. on this scene here it for you check.. (if any one has an english translation i would be forever in your debt.)

so anyway, I was expecting lo fi soul and complicated funk, but what i got was completely different.. wierd Baldelli style cosmic stomping, ambient soundtrack things and a couple of proto electro tracks that sound like they have been recorded in underground bathroom.. all in all a pretty strange comp.
ANY IDEAS?